Orion Loaded into Work Stand at Kennedy

Orion is lowered onto a work stand in the Neil Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Engineers loaded the Orion pressure vessel, or underlying structure of the crew module, into a work stand in the Neil Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Feb. 2. The pressure vessel’s seven large pieces were welded together at the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans between September 2015 and January 2016. It will fly thousands of miles beyond the moon on Exploration Mission-1.

The pressure vessel provides a sealed environment to support astronauts and is key for future human-rated crew modules. The Orion team will test the pressure vessel to make sure it’s structurally sound and then begin outfitting it with the spacecraft’s other systems and subsystems. Over the next 18 months, more than 100,000 components will arrive to Kennedy for integration into Orion. Check out more photos of Orion’s trip to Kennedy.

3 thoughts on “Orion Loaded into Work Stand at Kennedy”

In the 1980s here in New Mexico we had a wonderful engineer teach us how we could make modules for human habitation on the moon and we even had an astronaut Jack Schmitt come in and talk to us. Jokingly we gave him a ‘parking’ ticket for leaving his vehicle on the moon. The class was called Architecture in Extreme environments.